Web design firm's span reaches from Dnieper to Danbury

Published 1:00 am, Tuesday, November 18, 2008

DANBURY -- Ukraine natives Alexander Oleshko and Stanislav Ptushkin grew up on opposite sides of their home country before moving to the United States with their families to the same Danbury apartment complex.

After meeting, the two soon found they had more in common than just the eastern European country of their births -- principally, a knack with computers and developing Web sites.

In May they started
Optimum Systems Online
, a two-man operation designing and building Web sites for businesses in the area.

Oleshko, 21, who came to the U.S. from Lviv, a city in western Ukraine near the country's border with Poland, got the idea to start the firm while working for another Web design outfit in Stamford.

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"That's what got me interested," he said during an interview Tuesday. "I saw the possibilities. Up here in Danbury there's much more of a market, because it's not much developed yet in that area."

Ptushkin, 22, a more recent arrival to the country -- he came two years ago from the city of Zaporizhzhia, on the Dnieper River in eastern Ukraine -- said he hadn't thought of Web design as a career until working with Oleshko.

"It wasn't work," he said. "It was more my hobby."

The pair's operation is decidedly small -- they don't even rent office space, though they plan to eventually. But Oleshko says that's just one factor that helps them deliver a cheaper product to their customers.

Another is the fact that they collaborate with colleagues back home, who do a lot of the design work for clients' Web sites.

"We can partner up with anyone the client wants, but in terms of cost it will be a lot lower than U.S.-based operations just because we have partners in Ukraine whose hourly rate is a lot lower," Oleshko said.

"Most people would say, 'Why would I outsource it?' But you're really not outsourcing because we have local operations, we're doing work out of here. It's just that if you can save money on minor tasks, you should save money on them."

But what's more important than anything, Oleshko said, is a client's input.

"We get the client's perspective, ask what they like and what they don't like, then come up with a list of our ideas for them, what can we offer based on their likes and dislikes," he said.

"Usually we come up with a few designs, and at that point they can choose one and we'll work with that."

And building Web sites for others isn't their only creative outlet. They are in the process of overhauling their own presence on the Internet at
www.optimumsystemsonline.com
.